Bazal Morani

A strong believer in women's rights, I have joined with Queens and Future Queens to empower the women in our community. Professionally, I am a business consultant with a background in education. I love to empower and inspire.

So for those that don't know, I am an Ismaili Muslim and, like the Christian concept of Sunday school, we have religious education on Saturdays. Now the teachers are expected to go through training to ensure that we teach the students facts and accurate information, rather than opinions or perspectives. However, when I went into this training I realized that there was a fault in the training itself. Within teaching the facts, we somehow twisted the perspective based on emotional bias. When I was pitted against the trainer and the other teachers trying to explain my perspective, I felt something inside of me shift. The perspective you teach the students, regardless of the intent, does impact their view and emotional outlook on life because your emotional outlook on life will end up showing.

We all know the girl code. Regardless if it was taught to us or we simply learned it as we grew up and heard "Don't you know the girl code?"or "It's part of the girl code." An internationally known code that was never written in stone, and never truly verbalized, but universally followed. And the girls that broke the girl code? Shunned and isolated. A code created to protect us from getting hurt or betrayed. One based on the ethics of the young girls that created it and followed it.

There are so many Disney movie reviews and theories out there that we all think we know what our favorite stories are truly about. But looking at it in an empowering perspective, may teach us lessons for our daily lives and how to over come struggles we face. So starts are DISNEY PRINCESSES IN THE LIGHT OF QUEENS series. Let's start off with one of the first ever Disney Princess movies—Snow White.

For those of you who don't know, I am currently working with Queens and Future Queens (a non-profit organization determined to assist young girls in becoming future leaders through mentorship programs consisting of female CEOs, CFOs, etc. of big companies as well as inspirational speakers, artist, etc.) to create an event called Champions for Change Leadership Awards 2020. Now one of the things I needed to do was find empowering music for women to feature at the event and I found one song that really made me think. The song is "Strip" by Little Mix.

A few weeks ago I was sitting with a couple of friends and discussing our culture's expectation of women needing to be married by 23, and we ended up going into a discussion of how guys our age are just not worth considering for marriage. Now I could go on a rampage on everything that is wrong with men (which I probably will sneak in throughout this blog to to all the male readers—get out your notebook and pen, and pay attention please), but the more important factor here is the lack of equality and the gender bias that appears here.

Now, initially, I wasn't going to make this its own topic, but something happened on the night of June 30, 2019 that changed my mind. Now to understand this story, you need to know something about me. You see, I had been engaged for two years and ended up having it broken off when I finally came clean to my dad and told him I wasn't happy, and he encouraged me to do what I felt I needed to.